ABOUT

Gwyneth Shanks is a scholar of performance studies and contemporary art with specializations in museum studies and curatorial practice. By aligning performance studies, art history, and socially engaged practices, Shanks’s scholarship surfaces histories of live art that confront entangled colonial social structures and white-supremacist ideas of value that delimit global contemporary art.

Her first book, Another Museum is Necessary: Transient Performance in the Wake of Institutional Critique, is under contract with Duke University Press. The book positions movement-oriented artistic works presented by contemporary art museums in the US and Western Europe as central to an examination of what it means to destabilize and reimagine such institutions.

Her written scholarship has been published in Cultural Dynamics, Performance Matters, Third Text, X-TRA, ASAP/Journal, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and is included in the anthologies The Routledge Companion to Performance Art (Oxford, 2026) and the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Visual Culture (Bloomsbury, 2027).

Alongside her written scholarship, Shanks maintains a collaborative performance practice. Her performance project, a haunted botany (2023-ongoing), examines how botany’s colonial origins impact our present through ecological destruction and climate change. Created collaboratively with AB Brown (University of Virginia), a haunted botany is a multi-sited, socially engaged performance and printmaking project that explores the colonial entanglements of plants, people, and place. Her performance-based projects have been presented at Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum, Maine Maritime Museum, Hudson River Park, The Kitchen, Materials & Applications, and Highways. Her work has been supported through grants from the MAP Fund, Foundation for Contemporary Art, Maine Arts Commission, the NEA, and the Lunder Institute for American Art.